BACK to school this week and the new intake of Labour MPs, so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the afterglow of the election, seem to have dulled somewhat after a bit of contact with reality.
They have not yet adopted the deadened look that some long-time MPs have of a fish laid out on ice but they’re getting there.
In the canteen queue on Thursday morning to get a roll and sausage – an order which usually requires a little bit of translation south of the Border – I overhear a new Labour MP asking the man next to me what constituency he represents.
He says the name and she replies: “Red or blue?”
He confirms he is also a Labour MP and his seat is a former Tory stronghold.
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She expresses delight at the Conservative scalping before immediately switching to business: Will he support her bid for a committee chair?
He seemed positive, but I get the sense he’s getting a lot of these sorts of approaches at the moment.
In one of the toilets along the ministerial corridor, I find a leaflet for someone I’d never heard of looking to claim his own select committee.
It’s all relatively low-stakes, post-election political drama, a bit like how they start discussing the Ipswich Town and Nottingham Forest games towards the end of Match of the Day, after the big-ticket showdowns have been dealt with.
But who can blame them for getting caught up in the committee side-show when the business of Parliament has become really quite dry?
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Cast your mind back to before the election. The Tories had frittered so much of their majority that backbenchers could really throw their weight around. Things felt a wee bit more consequential.
This week, Labour’s four-page GB Energy Bill got through by 348 votes to a measly 95 noes.
Neither the SNP nor the LibDems bothered to vote – nor did a whopping 72 Labour MPs.
Those weren't abstentions on principle, by the way. Such is the size of Labour’s majority that much of the frontbench can just not show up, including Rachel Reeves (above), Yvette Cooper, Angela Rayner and the PM himself.
And while opposition MPs might take principled stands against the end of the universal Winter Fuel Payment, even if an internal Labour rebellion garnered the same number of MPs who abstained on the GB Energy Bill, they still couldn’t stop the Government from pressing ahead.
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Elsewhere, the former government seems to be adjusting to the relatively slower pace of opposition quite well.
I spied former energy secretary Claire Coutinho (below) on the Tube home the other night.
A beaming aide showed her an email from a very happy event organiser expressing their delight that she would attend whatever function she'd been invited to. She looked pleased, too.
The G7 it probably was not. But crammed into the bowels of the Earth with the rest of us plebs and getting home for a reasonable time of a Thursday, Coutinho looked like a weight had been lifted from her.
Maybe the opposition will give up the whole politics malarkey for a while and just put their feet up for the next few years.
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